NEWS | Wednesday, 29 August 2007

The Palace Hotel lacks MTA licence

James Debono

The Malta Tourism Authority has initiated legal action against hotelier Angelo Xuereb who is also standing as a candidate for the far right party ANR, after it turned out that the new Palace Hotel in High Street Sliema was operating without a licence for the past month.
The hotel had opened its doors and welcomed its first guests with a champagne reception on August 3. Popular Italian singer Gigi d’Alessio was one of the hotel’s first guests.
The MTA has not yet issued a licence because the planning permit for the hotel is not “fully compliant with the MTA licensing conditions.”
MEPA has never approved the construction of a new hotel but the development was approved as an extension to the existing Victoria Hotel.
But developer Angelo Xuereb blames the whole incident on bureacratic formalities, dismissing the whole incident as a “tiviality.”

Xuereb told Business Today that although the whole building of the hotel conforms to planning permits, plans for the hotel were submitted under the heading: “Extension to the Victoria Hotel.”
He protests, “How could I have known at that stage that I would be naming the new hotel as the Palace Hotel?”
Xuereb also claims that he was not aware that the new hotel lacked an MTA licence when it opened its doors to guests.
But he is sure that a solution to this bureaucratic quandary will be found soon.
“Surely the MTA are not against having a new five star hotel rather than an extension of a four star hotel. We have invested more and not less money in this project.”
Xuereb has now applied to get a permit for the new hotel from MEPA.
“This is just a minor amendment because the building itself respects previous permits.”
But Xuereb’s late application to regularise the new hotel could end up squeezed between the two authorities.
A MEPA spokesperson told MaltaToday that “a permit is required to change an extension to the hotel in to a completely new hotel.”
But this would require “prior clearance from the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA) before the application is validated and processed by MEPA.”

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